Hélène Cixous (1937-present) is a French author and critic famous for developing ideas in poststructuralist feminism. That's quite a mouthful! Read on for an explanation of her books, her biography, and also what she means when she says l'ecriture feminine.
Poststructuralism is a way of analysing texts in such a way that the straightforward meaning is questioned.
Of Jewish-Algerian descent, Cixous was and is a prolific writer, having published a breathtaking number of novels, critical essays, plays, and books of poetry (twenty-three poetry collections in total!) and more than seventy books overall.
Cixous was profoundly influenced by thinkers such as Sigmund Freud (1856-1939), Jacques Derrida (1930-2004) and Jacques Lacan (1901-1981). Freud's work in psychoanalysis, and especially his work on gender, provided Cixous with a foundation for her own work. Derrida was the most important influence for Cixous.
Helene Cixous biography
Cixous's early biography is somewhat complex. She is the daughter of Jewish parents who were living in French Algeria when she was born. Because of this, Cixous considers herself able to understand two groups. On the one hand, she was French and part of the Algerian colonial experience. As a French person living in Algeria, she was, in some senses, an 'oppressor'. On the other hand, she was Jewish and, therefore, part of an oppressed group. This, she believes, gave her special insight.
Fig.1 - An Algerian city where Cixous was born.
As for her academic career, she rose to prominence soon after publishing her doctoral thesis on James Joyce (1882-1941). It was called The Exile of James Joyce, or the Art of Displacement and was published in 1968.
1968 was the year of student riots in Paris, which went on for a total of seven weeks. The country seemed to some to be on the verge of another revolution, and the economy stalled completely. The protests were caused by far-left students.
It was at this time that Cixous started a university called the University of Paris VIII. It was meant to be an alternative to the standard setting for higher education in France. It became the location of the first centre for women's studies in Europe, which was founded in 1974.
Cixous had a long-standing friendship and professional association with the famous deconstructionist Jacques Derrida. They were both French Jews born in Algeria. It was Derrida who described Cixous as the 'greatest living writer in French'; such was his admiration for her. Cixous wrote a book about Derrida called Portrait de Jacques Derrida en jeune saint juif (Portrait of Jacques Derrida as a Young Jewish Saint). (2001)
Deconstructionism is a literary theory which disrupts the relationship between a text and its meaning. It was founded by Jacques Derrida.
Cixous has won numerous awards, including honorary degrees from universities around the world, from Cornell university in the USA to the University of York in the UK.
Hélène Cixous l'écriture feminine
Cixous developed what is called l'écriture feminine (women's writing). The aim was to develop a style of writing which was qualitatively different from male writing. Male writing, Cixous argued, was based on exclusion. In écriture feminine, there would be characteristically female traits, such as pauses in the flow of the writing, along with interruptions or disruptions, puns, and intentional silences.
As a leader in the movement known as the 'new French feminism', Cixous was vitally important, alongside others, including Antoinette Fouque (1936-2014).
Cixous's most well-known essay is called 'The Laugh of the Medusa' (Le Rire de la Méduse in the original French), published in 1975. In it, Cixous argues that women can and should use their bodies to communicate because language (derived from a patriarchal system) is not available to them.
It is in this essay that she first uses the term 'women's writing' or female writing (écriture feminine). Women's writing as a writing style provides women with a way of creating their own identities outside the conventional writing styles owned and dominated by men. Her focus is on the individuality of women, especially the individuality of their bodies. It is this (the body) that she believes holds the key to authorship.
The female writing style
is eccentric, incomprehensible and inconsistent, and the difficulty to understand it is attributed to centuries of suppression of the female voice, which now speaks in a borrowed language. Believed to originate from the mother in the stage of the mother-child relation before the child acquires the male-centred verbal language, this pre-linguistic and unconscious potentiality manifests itself in those literary texts which, abolishing all repressions, undermine and subvert all significations, the logic and the closure of the phallocentric language, and opens into a joyous freeplay of meanings.1
This approach meant that Cxous was free to write as she wished, and this led to some innovative writing by her, evident in her fiction and poetry.
Helene Cixous quotes
In her writing and interviews, Cixous asserted the importance of the return of women to writing. She endeavoured to formulate a unique style, semi-autobiographical, which would act as a way for women to re-enter the fray as writers in their own right. She knew that the way back would involve pain, as, indeed any real writing does (see below).
Woman must write her self: must write about women and bring women to writing, from which they have been driven away as violently as from their bodies - for the same reasons, by the same law, with the same fatal goal. Woman must put herself into the text - as into the world and into history - by her own movement.2
Cixous is critical of patriarchal language. By adopting the language of patriarchal norms, Cixous argued, women could write 'themselves' and be free of 'correction', of having to use language and prescribed ways, which opens women up to being corrected. By using language differently, the danger and fear of correction by men would be removed.
We must learn to speak the language women speak when there is no one there to correct us.' Helene Cixous
In her essay 'The Laugh of the Medusa', she counters the fears men have of women finding their own voice.
You only have to look at the Medusa straight on to see her. And she's not deadly. She's beautiful and she's laughing.2
Cixous saw women's language as revolutionary. She understood women's writing to be similar to the revolutionary protests she was part of in 1968 during the student uprising in France. For Cixous and other deconstructionists, writing was never only about writing; it was a highly politicised approach to the big questions about society, religion, patriarchy, meaning and truth.
Women must write through their bodies, they must invent the impregnable language that will wreck partitions, classes, and rhetorics, regulations and codes, they must submerge, cut through, get beyond the ultimate reverse-discourse, including the one that laughs at the very idea of pronouncing the word "silence"...In one another we will never be lacking.2
As mentioned above, writing as a revolutionary act is painful. It requires sacrifice and courage.
The only book that is worth writing is the one we don't have the courage or strength to write. The book that hurts us (we who are writing), that makes us tremble, redden, bleed.' Helene Cixous
Helene Cixous books
Cixous has written numerous books. Here is a selection:
- The Exile of James Joyce, 1972.
- To Live the Orange, 1979.
- Angst, 1985.
- The Newly Born Woman, 1986.
- The Book of Promethea, 1991.
- The Hélène Cixous Reader. Translated by Sellers, Susan, 1994.
- Rootprints: Memory and Life Writing, 1997.
- Portrait of Jacques Derrida as a Young Jewish Saint, 2004.
- Dream I Tell You, 2006.
- Reveries of the Wild Woman: Primal Scenes, 2006.
- Love Itself: In the Letter Box, 2008.
- Hyperdream, 2009.
- Hemlock: old women in bloom, 2011.
Aside from these, Cixous wrote a number of plays and significant amounts of critical essays.
Helene Cixous - Key takeaways
- Hélène Cixous is a French author and critic famous for developing ideas around poststructuralist feminism.
- Of Jewish-Algerian descent, Cixous was and is a prolific writer, having published a breathtaking number of novels, critical essays, plays, and books of poetry (twenty-three poetry collections in total!) and more than seventy books overall.
- She rose to prominence soon after publishing her doctoral thesis on James Joyce. It was called The Exile of James Joyce, or the Art of Displacement and was published in 1968.
- Cixous developed what is called écriture feminine (feminine writing).
- Cixous had a long-standing friendship and professional association with the famous deconstructionist Jacques Derrida (1930-2004)
References
- Nasrullah Mambrol, Ecriture Feminine. Literariness.org
- Helene Cixous, The Laugh of the Medusa, 1976
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